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Haptic Interaction Design for Everyday Interfaces

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Haptic Interaction Design for Everyday Interfaces CHAPTER 5 Haptic Interaction Design for Everyday Interfaces By Karon E. MacLean This chapter sets about to provide the background and orientation needed to set a novice designer on his or her way to bringing haptics successfully into an interactive product. To define appropriate roles for haptic interaction, it is necessary to integrate a basic awareness of human capabilities on one hand and current device technology on the other. Here, I explore this integration by first summarizing the most salient constraints imposed by both humans and hardware. I then proceed to relate perceptual, motor, and attentional capabil- ities to a selection of emerging application contexts chosen to be relevant to contemporary design trends and opportunities. These include abstract communication and notification, augmentation of graphical user interfaces, expressive control, affective communication, and mobile and handheld computing. Our touch (haptic) sense is such an integral part of our everyday experience that few of us really notice it. Notice it now, as you go about your business. Within and beneath our skin lie layers of ingenious and diverse tactile receptors comprising our tactile sens- ing subsystem. These receptors enable us to parse textures, assess temperature and mate- rial, guide dexterous manipulations, find a page’s edge to turn it, and deduce a friend’s mood from a touch of his hand. Intermingled with our muscle fibers and within our joints are load cells and position transducers making up our proprioceptive sense, which tell our nervous systems of a limb’s position and motion and the resistance it encounters. Without these and their close integration with our body’s motor control, it would be ex- ceedingly difficult to break an egg neatly into a bowl, play a piano, walk without tripping, stroke a pet, write, draw, or even type. Touch is our earliest sense to develop (Montagu, 1986). It has evolved to work in a tight partnership with vision and hearing in many ways we are only beginning to understand, as we study processes (such as hand-eye coordination) and how we process conflicting or competing information from different senses. In stark contrast to the importance of touch in our everyday experience, the use of touch is marginalized in contemporary computer interfaces, overlooked in the rush to accom- modate graphical capability in desktop-based systems. The primary advances have been in feel-focused improvements in nonactuated pointing tools for both function and aes- thetics. Scroll wheels have been designed for the user to click with just the right resistance and frequency; and most cell phones now come with vibrators that indicate incoming calls. Meanwhile, the use of haptic feedback in the consumer sphere is largely limited to gaming, and tactile feedback to simple cell phone alerts. DOI 10.1518/155723408X342826. Copyright 2008 Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. All rights reserved. 149 150 Reviews of Human Factors and Ergonomics, Volume 4 So much more is possible, or will be soon. On the human side, the horizon is expand- ing as we improve our understanding of haptic perception; on the technology side, hap- tic display innovation and pricing are just starting to benefit from the volume effects of inclusion in large consumer bases. The goal of this chapter, which is targeted at the novice haptic application designer with a background in human-computer interaction (HCI) and usability engineering, is to describe this new horizon and to provide some guidance about how to use an intimate, yet unfamiliar, modality with maximal effectiveness. I assume a context of ubiquitous computing rather than virtual reality (Weiser, 1991); although the former has received far less attention by haptics researchers, it has the potential to directly influence many more users. In this chapter I describe the constraints within which designers must work—some de- fined by fixed human abilities, others by hardware limits that will certainly change. The potential functionality of haptic feedback is then outlined through discussions of a num- ber of basic interactions and related application contexts in which haptic interfaces are well positioned to play an important role. Taken together, these perspectives are intended to help designers identify and successfully exploit new uses of haptic feedback. A ROLE FOR HAPTICS IN THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE OF COMPUTATION Origins and Definitions Active haptic devices are interfaces to computers or networks that exchange power (e.g., forces, vibrations, heat) through contact with some part of the user’s body, following a programmed interactive algorithm. For example, a force feedback device can physically render a computed virtual environment model within limits such as its workspace and actuator torque. Cell phone vibrators and force feedback game joysticks are also active hap- tic interfaces; whereas the vibrator is only a display, the joystick is both an input and an output device, and its control is considerably more complex. The concept has been explicitly in place in the robotics world since around 1990, with first credit usually given to Minsky’s textural explorations (Minsky, Ouh-Young, Steele, & Behensky, 1990) and Brooks’s scientific “hapticizations” (Brooks, Ouh-Young, Batter, & Kilpatrick, 1990). However, these early examples were foreshadowed by a vast body of work in teleoperation and rehabilitation research extending back to World War II. Although the need for custom hardware once limited haptics research to a small community of robotics engineers, the release of the first (expensive) commercial desktop haptic dis- play—Sensable Technologies’ Phantom in 1996—opened the world of haptic interfaces to professionals in other fields (Massie & Salisbury, 1994; Sensable Technologies, 1996). It is now possible to purchase commodity haptic devices (e.g., mice, gaming joysticks and steering wheels, vibrating cell phones). You can also create your own: A variety of tactors (vibrotactile displays) are available from discount electronics sources and drivable from your computer’s audio card. Simple, reasonably high performance force feedback displays can be assembled out of commonly used components with only a little mechatronic prowess (Hayward & MacLean, Haptic Interaction Design for Everyday Interfaces 151 2007), and open-source and proprietary software libraries ease their programming. Al- though a vast divide remains between the display fidelity of current haptic versus graphic technology, the entry level for utilizing haptic feedback has become much lower. But as always, coming up with a “killer app” is more of a challenge, and getting it right even more so. Current Trends: The Expanding Reach of Computation Whereas haptic display advances move along at one pace, the role and reach of compu- tation and networking in the world outside the research lab are evolving and expanding at a blinding rate. It is worth singling out aspects of these changes with acute relevance to the new possibilities enabled by active haptic feedback. Networking. Everyone is connected, in ever more places and for a larger part of their time. Being in constant contact with others has become a way of life for many since the Internet and cell phone use became dominant features of society in the 1990s. Technically, these high-speed networks have moved virtual touching—whether of other people or of virtual representations of electronic constructs, by wire and in real time—out of science fiction and into the present. Ubiquity of computing devices. Computation is everywhere, not just on the desk. It is used on the go, in nontraditional contexts, and without the benefit of a big graphic dis- play. As everyone knows who has used a cell phone for more than a phone call or a PDA for more than entering an address, or braved an automobile’s onboard communications console to change the radio station, there is a need and an opportunity in this sparse visual real estate for enhanced information display. Multitasking. As a direct consequence of the preceding factors, people increasingly do more than one thing at once—because they can and because they now feel they must. Frequently this means their eyes are busy with one task while their ears, hands, and/or voice are taking care of something unrelated. For this reason—as much as the absence of a large, high-resolution screen—having additional information conduits besides vision seems like it might be a useful thing, if our caffeinated brains can handle it. Virtualization of personal presence. In many ways, personal presence has become optional: Employees work from home, students attend class remotely, parents and chil- dren live on nonintersecting schedules, everyone shops online. The convenience is unde- niable, but the net effect when the bricks-and-mortar version of the institution is nearly empty has a profound impact on group dynamics and personal engagement. Social sci- entists are busy identifying the key elements of personal engagement that are lost in this development, from nonverbal conversational cues in individual interactions (e.g., Knapp & Hall, 2005; Sproull & Kiesler, 1991) to impacts on larger collectives (for a discussion, see Menzies, 2005). The need for remote collaboration and communication tools that fos- ter inclusiveness, nonverbal support, and a sense of social presence for both professional and personal contexts has been well recognized (Grudin, 1988). 152 Reviews of Human Factors and Ergonomics, Volume 4 Information management. The network creates a veritable firehose of information pouring across us. One can think of these as a volume challenge (there is simply too much information, and it needs to be filtered and triaged in some way before we see it) and as an attention challenge (contributing to fragmentation). Fragmentation. An important artifact of constant connection and task juggling is con- tinual interruption, even when a person’s primary task requires continuity. Jobs not pro- tected from the barrage must be accomplished in time slices, whether the slicing is due to an incoming e-mail or to the need to cross the street while getting GPS directions.
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